Marketing ideas -- foreign-born experts v. outsourced/H1B Visa "cheap guys"

[Bryan J. Smith]

On Sat, 2006-04-22 at 20:23 +0530, Tejas Dinkar wrote:
> Ok, perhaps I misunderstood your post.

No, I'm partly responsible for not explaining my viewpoint better.

I'm a very frustrated American Engineer.  I'm seeing American businesses
piss our country down the drain.  Not because developers are Indian,
Irish or Israeli, but because with so much H1B Visa abuse and
outsourcing, 90% of its is crap just because it saves money.

It's not like it was in the mid-'90s and earlier, when you didn't have
expansion of the H1B Visa system and outsourcing was done carefully.
I've worked in the defense industry, semiconductor industry and the
financial industry over 15 years now.

It used to be that foreign-born engineers and technologists were given
Green Cards and became the most outstanding of Americans.  Because they
were allowed to move from company to company, he could ask for the same
salaries as myself.  If he wasn't qualified, he didn't last, because an
American was the same price.  That's why 90% of immigrant engineers were
very qualified -- far more than the percentage of Americans who really
didn't deserve their positions at times.  It was a great balance!

Now we have the H1B Visa system, not an immigration system at all.
Having qualified Americans replaced with crap, just because they are
1/3rd the price, is horrendous.  So we've gone from 90% quality of
immigrants (displacing maybe 50-60% _unqualified_ Americans -- which is
a _good_thing_ -- especially since most of these immigrants will become
Americans!) to 10% quality immigrants (replacing _all_ Americans,
including the 40-50% qualified -- just because they are 1/3rd the
salary).

Outsourcing is now a joke.  Every company I've worked at spends more on
"fixing" what they get back, sending Americans overseas to supervise
development teams, and generally _discarding_ most of what they get.  In
many cases, the original business manager who started it has been
promoted because of the savings, and the next guy is "stuck with it."
Why?  Because these Indian, Irish, Israeli and other companies I've
worked with _oversell_ what they can do.  I have fixed so much crap, and
saved their butts so many times (e.g., when I've been a peer-consultant
on-site to their firms) it sickens me.

I've seen it first hand at most of the companies I mentioned before.

Open Source?  This crap doesn't happen.  You get the _best_ the world
has to offer, period.  People either know or they don't, or they learn
trying, failing, picking themselves back up and succeeding.  That is
what made American engineering strong in the past.  I'm very happy, both
as an American and engineer, to see that this is a world-wide reality.

In fact, nothing sickens me as both an engineer and as an American than
when I see a technician say, "oh, Microsoft gives me job security
because their stuff always breaks."  And people wonder why the US is
going down the toilet!

> I Apologize for accusing you of being racist.

Hey, I'm a land-locked, 1-language, ignorant American.  Sometimes I need
to check to make sure I'm not being a racist or bigot.  No offense taken
at all -- especially since I didn't detail what I meant.

> It just struck a bit close to home.

I know.  Just try to realize what I'm saying.

I've worked with extremely intelligent, uniquely qualified, foreign-born
individuals from literally 50+ nations in my career.  Most of them were
far more intelligent than I.

But in today's American corporation that develops software for either
in-house use or sale, it's changes drastically over the last 8 years.
It's gone from finding that talent and asking them to become an American
to telling them they have to work for 1/3rd their worth and they can't
become Americans.

If you think that is bad for America, what about that uniquely
qualified, foreign-born expert who is now not only surrounded by his
"cheap labor" peers, but then assumed to be "just another
under-qualified, but cheap H1B Visa worker" like them?

90% of H1B Visa workers and outsourcing partners are crap today.  And
that's who's writing in-house and commercial software in America's
Fortune 100 companies.




-- 
Bryan J. Smith             Professional, technical annoyance
mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org       http://thebs413.blogspot.com
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